It's taken a whole lotta moxie for one of San Diego's youngest but most vibrant theater companies to go from vagabond upstart to local phenom, complete with a plum guest gig at a leading regional theater.

And a whole lotta Moxie is exactly what audiences will see starting this week, when Moxie Theatre opens its tenure as La Jolla Playhouse's new resident theater company. The troupe is staging a sprawling production (at least by the company's scrappy standards) of “Drink Me, or The Strange Case of Alice Times Three.”

The residency, and the ambitious mounting of the supernaturally minded Mary Fengar Gail play, are the latest and biggest stages in the evolution of Moxie over the past five years.

And they come in tandem with another milestone for the women-centered company: Moxie, which has never had a performance space to call its own, recently inked a contract to sublease Cygnet Theatre's original home in the Rolando district near SDSU, and is announcing a five-play season for the space starting in October.

Looking at all this, it might be tempting to say Moxie has arrived, except for the fact this is one company that never seems quite content to stand still.

If wordplay on the Moxie name, by the way, seem a little overdone at this point, don't tell the people who run the company. “Moxie” — that crisp little term meaning courage, persistence, can-do pep — pops up often in conversation with the gals (and some guys) behind the operation, and the concept seems part of the company's DNA.

“We wanted the play here for our residency to have moxie,” says Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, the company's artistic director, on an evening rehearsal break at the Playhouse's Studio Theatre. “So, we wanted it to be ambitious and imaginative. Because we think those things express who we are as a company.”

With an adventurous mix of murder mystery, sorcery and dark comedy, and a cast of eight, “Drink Me” centers on three witchy sisters, scads of disappearing men and the strange voyage of a detective trying to sort the whole thing out.

The beauty of the residency, says the Moxie crew, is that the rehearsal time and resources provided by the Playhouse give the staging a much better chance to find its feet and find an audience.

“Half of the reviews for our shows say, ‘It's a shame they had to close so soon,’ ” says Jennifer Eve Thorn, Moxie associate artistic director, marketing director and Sonnenberg's co-director for the new play. “I think we're tired of three-week runs that end in great reviews the week we close.

“(So we thought) ‘What would happen if we could actually build a huge show, cast a huge cast, work our butts off rehearsing, and then run it the length a regular theater gets to run a play?’ ”

Moxie is the second local company to earn a tenure at the La Jolla theater, under a program launched last year by Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley.

The residency program offers not just free rehearsal and performance space, but administrative support and the prestige of gaining the Playhouse imprimatur.

Ashley says it was one of the first initiatives he embarked upon after arriving at the Playhouse not quite two years ago. He started dropping into local theaters right away to soak in the local scene, and one of the first works he saw was Moxie's production in December 2007 of Kathryn Walat's “Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen.”

Ashley liked the work so much that when Walat's name surfaced as a playwriting candidate for the Playhouse's POP Tour educational program, he helped champion her successful bid for a commission.

Walat's play “Miss Electricity” debuted through the POP program last year — one of several instances in which Moxie has helped further a female playwright's career. (The company staged a second Walat play, “Bleeding Kansas,” last fall.)

In “Kansas,” “Victoria Martin” and “Bluebonnet Court,” another Moxie play Ashley saw, “You could really feel their mission in the work,” he says. “Which isn't always true. Some people spend a lot of time doing a mission statement, and then ignore it.

“But I feel their work is really true to their idea of diversity and honest portrayals of women.”

Starting small

Those were the kinds of ideals that Sonnenberg, Thorn, managing director Jo Anne Glover and fellow co-founder Liv Kellgren (who's no longer with the company) had in mind when they launched Moxie, first with a production of David Lindsay-Abaire's “Kimberly Akimbo” in 2004, then a full season in 2005.

Sonnenberg had come up through San Diego Rep and other local theaters after arriving in San Diego in the late 1990s, and the other co-founders had worked with her as actors.

Opening that first season was Liz Duffy Adams' “Dog Act,” which Moxie will reprise as its 2009-10 opener. The company has since shown a penchant for exploring multiple works by the same writer: It staged Adams' “The Listener” last year as well as her “Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitudes” in 2006, and likewise has produced another Fengair Gail play, “Devil Dog 6,” a significant success for the company in 2007.

“I certainly think that if we were producing more mainstream work, we would have more access financially to donors,” says Thorn. “From a marketing standpoint alone, it's hard to sell an unknown product that sounds like nothing anyone's ever heard of.”

But the no-prisoners approach has helped win respect and collaboration from a wide array of talents across San Diego's theater scene.

As the company rehearsed “Drink Me” on a recent evening at the Playhouse, the cast members poring over lines and working through scenes included Stephen Elton, artistic associate at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, and Kristianne Kurner, executive artistic director of New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.

Neither is seen often outside their own theaters (Elton rarely acts at all), but both were drawn in through the relationships they've developed with the “Moxies.”

Kurner says she particularly appreciates how Moxie, despite staging a lot of plays by women, tends to explode any musty notions of what constitutes a “women's play.”

She tells of hearing from a couple of macho friends, hockey players, who found their sensitivities surprisingly in sync with the company's.

“They went out for a guys' night last month — a big guys' night out,” says Kurner. “And they texted me that they were going to see Moxie Theatre's ‘Butcher of Baraboo.’

“I thought, if you can get these two ultra-masculine hockey guys to see a Moxie show, it's all good.”

That play, at Diversionary Theatre, was another one on which Moxie took a flyer. Marisa Wegrzyn's bloody, black comedy did well at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago but was subsequently panned in its 2007 New York debut. That didn't faze Sonnenberg.

“This is why we exist,” Sonnenberg says. “I read that play and I was like, ‘I love this play. We've gotta do this play!’ And then I read that all the reviews were terrible, but I didn't think for a second — I just assumed it wasn't the play. Because I liked it.”

The production went off well enough that Wegrzyn, who had all but written off the play, flew out to see it on Moxie's closing weekend.

“You kind of get that terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach, after something like (the poor New York reception), that nobody's going to want to touch the play,” says Wegrzyn.

She was relieved and heartened to find that “the Moxie production was a lot more precise in how to tackle the comedy and the dark stuff and the drama.”

And for Moxie, “It was so wonderful to see new life breathed into this artist who is at a pivotal moment in her career,” says Glover. “I felt maybe we helped push her toward a more hopeful path.”

Part of Moxie's point of view is that they owe it to female playwrights to support their creative impulses, even when those run counter to what's likely to sell.

“I think it takes a lot of moxie to write a play and know the majority of work getting produced right now is four-person plays that take place in living rooms,” says Thorn. “Because that's what theaters can afford.

“We're in an economic crunch, and if you want to get produced, you write plays that can get produced. You don't write plays that have nine people in them, where people have to sing and they have to become witches. That just doesn't sound safe and produceable.”